Dr. Leah Zhang-Kennedy is an Assistant Professor in interaction design and user experience research at the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, University of Waterloo. Her research focuses on understanding and improving privacy experiences and practices for various user segments using multidisciplinary methods in HCI and user experience design.
She is a cross-appointed faculty in the Department of Systems Design Engineering and Cheriton School of Computer Science at the U of W and an Adjunct Research Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carleton University. She is a faculty member of the Waterloo Games Institute and Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute, and a member of Waterloo HCI. She is also an adjunct research professor in the School of Computer Science at Carleton University and co-supervises graduate students in the Master of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) program.
Dr. Leah Zhang-Kennedy research studies the interactions of human factors and computing systems in the inherently interdisciplinary domains of human-centric cybersecurity and privacy, drawing on the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI), usable privacy and security (UPS), and user experience (UX) research. Her work is premised on the belief that computer science-based approaches, while necessary, are insufficient to tackle cybersecurity challenges alone. To understand the varied aspects of cybersecurity and privacy, scholarly contributions from a range of disciplines are necessary. With her research team, she studies these intersections via multiple methods, including auto-ethnography, interviews, surveys, experiments, and system implementation, among others.
From teaching students to creating novel design solutions to leading events, Dr. Zhang-Kennedy's work is featured in Waterloo's 2021 Global Impact Report, Stratford School's 2022 Think Privacy news page, and the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute's CPI spotlight in 2024.